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Pike, Stewed
Clean and scale a pike weighing about four pounds, and cut it into slices three-quarters of an inch thick. Dissolve two ounces of butter in a stewpan. Put with it a shallot and a small onion finely chopped, a table-spoonful of shredded parsley, two cloves, and a little pepper and salt. Shake these ingredients over the fire for five or six minutes, then pour over them half a pint of stock or water, a glassful of claret, and a glassful of vinegar. Lay the fish in the stewpan, cover closely, and let it simmer until done enough. Take it up, and lay it on a hot dish. Thicken the sauce with a little flour and butter, stir into it a table-spoonful of bruised capers, let it boil a minute, and pour it over the fish. Time, altogether, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A straightforward court-bouillon stew of freshwater fish, with a red-wine and vinegar sauce thickened at the end. The only real trap is the stated time.
- The timing to ignore"Three-quarters of an hour" is the total including preparation, not the simmer. Three-quarter-inch slices of pike are done in 8 to 12 minutes at a bare simmer, when the flesh flakes from the bone at around 145F. Held longer, pike turns cottony.
- GlassfulA wineglass in Victorian cookery books is usually reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, though the figure varies from book to book. Half a pint here is 10 imperial fluid ounces, a generous 1 1/4 cups, against roughly 1/4 cup each of claret and vinegar. That is still a sharply acid braise by modern taste; halving the vinegar is defensible.
- ClaretClaret means dry red Bordeaux, or any dry, moderately tannic red. Nothing sweet, and nothing labelled "cooking wine."
- StewpanA wide, shallow pan with a tight lid — a sauté pan or braiser, not a deep stockpot. The slices should sit in one layer with the liquid coming most of the way up them.
- Thickening"A little flour and butter" is presumably beurre manié: butter and flour in roughly equal proportion, mashed to a paste and whisked into the liquid off the boil, then boiled a minute to lose the raw flour taste. The recipe specifies no amount; about 2 teaspoons of each suits this quantity of sauce.
- The fishNorthern pike is bony, with a row of Y-shaped intermuscular bones along the loin; warn anyone at the table. Pickerel, walleye, or any firm freshwater fish works, and cod or haddock steaks will take this sauce well if pike is unavailable. Scaling is easier if the fish is very fresh and wet.
- Capers"Bruised" means crushed slightly with the flat of a knife so they release brine into the sauce. Rinse salt-packed capers first; the dish already carries a great deal of vinegar.
- YieldFour pounds of whole pike yields roughly two pounds of edible flesh once head, frame and skin are discounted, which covers the four or five persons the book claims.
Pike was for centuries one of the more prestigious fish on an English table, precisely because it came from ponds and rivers rather than the sea and so reached inland households alive. Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653) gives an elaborate stuffed and roasted pike and calls it a dish "too good for any but anglers or very honest men"; by the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the 1870s, the fish had slipped down the social order as railways made sea fish cheap and reliable in every market town, and pike survived largely as an angler's prize to be cooked at home. The sauce here, with its wine, vinegar, cloves and capers, is a late survival of a much older way with freshwater fish, whose muddy, soft flesh was often said to call for sharp acid and warm spice rather than the butter-and-cream treatments given to sole and turbot. The entry's "probable cost, uncertain" is worth noting: the book prices most things to the penny.